Family Room Renovation Continued 2

Moving along on the family room renovation.

In our last post, we shared that we’d ripped the ceilings out to install can lights.

We wanted to make the opening between the kitchen and family room larger, so we removed a portion of that wall.

To give you a little more perspective on what we removed, the photo below shows the former area that butted up to the removed wall (far end looking into family room). It doesn’t look as deep as in the picture above because …

It wasn’t. In the photo below, you’re looking from the foyer into the kitchen. See the door on the left? That leads to a large closet that butted up to the back side of the desk. That area is what we took out which included the desk, closet and most of the divider wall between the kitchen and family room.

This is where we ran into a slight snag. You can see in the photo below where we’ve torn it all out. But notice that black pole running from ceiling to floor on the left side of the photo? It’s plumbing coming from an upstairs bathroom. Now, if you knew where the upstairs bathrooms were you would never think this is where a main pipe would be. But, it didn’t matter because we needed that space so the wall had to go. We’ll address the plumbing when we move into that portion of the project.

Once we were done with all the demo and had the sheetrock up in the family room ceiling, TJ began installing the trim. He trimmed all the doorways, the ceiling, and the ceiling beams. If we’d left them wood, we wouldn’t have, but because we were going to paint them we wanted them trimmed also.

Speaking of paint. After many attempts to find a stain we liked for the walls (we couldn’t), we decided to paint. Can you imagine? All that work sanding those walls could have been avoided if we’d decided to paint to begin with. We only needed to sand enough to get rid of the shine and prepare the wood so that paint would adhere, not sanding so much that we removed most of the old stain. But, sometimes that’s the way it works when you DIY. The good news is we figured it out before we re-stained and, importantly, we weren’t paying anyone else to sand! While we couldn’t find a stain we wanted to use, we did find our paint color =)

Because both the walls and the fireplace were very uneven surfaces, TJ made a custom trim that would allow for the differences in depth. He made it simple (and relatively inexpensive) by ripping a piece of cabinet grade plywood, adding crown molding at the top and a small piece of trim at the base.

Below is a picture that shows the trim along the doorway and ceiling. For the doorway he again ripped the cabinet grade plywood and then used small trim to accent. It’s more time consuming, but its a more economical way to get a nice looking trim job.

And here is a picture looking into the kitchen now that the wall is down and the archway has been started. We’ll provide more detail on building an archway in a separate post.

Here is a closeup of a column of the archway. Isn’t it amazing! Wait till you see it sanded and painted!